Learn Lingala Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Lingala passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Bantu language of the Congo river basin, lingua franca of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, Latin script with tone marks, ~40M speakers including L2.

Tap any word for instant translation

Every word in your Lingala reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help — useful for parsing the simplified noun-class agreement system.

Read about topics you choose

Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Lingala reading passage — from Papa Wemba lyrics to Kinshasa football news.

What is Lingala and where is it spoken?

Lingala is a Bantu language of the Niger-Congo family that developed in the late 19th century along the Congo river as a trade language. Today it is the lingua franca of Kinshasa and Brazzaville and is widely used in Congolese rumba and soukous music. Estimates of total speakers — native plus second language — reach around 40 million across the DRC, the Republic of the Congo, and diaspora communities.

What grammar features does Lingala have?

Lingala uses noun classes (around 10 in regular use, simplified compared with classical Bantu systems), SVO word order, and an agglutinative verb that takes subject prefixes, tense/aspect markers and object suffixes. It is a tonal language with two register tones, often written with acute (´) and grave (`) accents. Like other Bantu languages it has productive applicative, causative and reciprocal verb extensions.